Heal the battle with your Inner Rebel

Here this week, I’m celebrating a decade of work – the 10th anniversary of Growing Human(kind)ness. This anniversary brings up much in me – namely, gratitude and wonder! In service of this anniversary, and in honor of the new year, I’ve been tweaking my vision for what I yearn to offer in 2017. Today I want to tell you a bit about that deeper vision, and how you can join me.

Making sense of food compulsions

Ten years ago, when I first began writing, and even before that, when I was searching for answers to heal my own 20 years of eating disorders, I followed an intuitive hunch that there was something else underneath food compulsions.

I found the answer, surprisingly, in parenting. For by 2007, I was the mother of four children – a graduate school unlike any other! As I learned about parenting and child development, and as I learned more about myself through mothering (the relationship of motherhood will, indeed, bring up all your own untended losses and shine a light on your own “stuckness”) the threads began to weave together.

What was disjointed and overwhelming – why do I binge? Why can’t I stop obsessing over sugar? Why do I hate my body with such intensity? – began to coalesce, and make sense.

During this time, the books that were most helpful for me in healing my own eating disorders weren’t about food or overeating. They were parenting books. And so my mentors and teachers became primarily developmental psychologists.

The answer to addiction is connection

My own journey mirrored our culture’s journey.

Over the past decade, our understanding of developmental psychology, attachment theory, neuroscience and brain development has deepened and intertwined with our understanding of addiction, vulnerability, and eating disorders.

Now more than ever I feel that it’s crucial to shift our understanding, and to place relationship, belonging, and human connection at the center of our dialogue around food compulsions.

I get frustrated by overeating approaches that focus on fixing behavior without an understanding of what’s underneath. It hurts my heart when they don’t work and foster shame, heartbreak, and discouragement in those who suffer.

I want to channel and move this frustration into an opportunity to foster change!

Changing how we see

I yearn to fundamentally change how we see – how we look at food compulsions like binge eating, overeating and sugar addiction. By changing how we see, we can change how we respond, how we relate, and how we support healing and growth.

This change of heart opens the door for Life to move – what truly unfolds and heals.

Why we need to move away from an overfocus on ‘self regulation’

With this shift in perspective, the way out also becomes clear – supporting the healing process with loving relationship, connection, attachment, and compassion. This feels so much different than a “top down” attempt to control or eradicate behavior. It’s a fundamental shift from behaviorism and control into development and relationship.

I believe that Western culture’s overfocus on the self – the belief that “I need to regulate better, that I need to get myself together” – is one of the threads that is contributing to the increase in overeating and binge eating we are seeing today. It is not the solution.

Here’s how it could be different – when someone struggles with cravings and wants to binge or overeat, a self focused approach would focus on the skills this person needs to learn to manage their emotions without food. A connection based approach asks this question – what kind of support might help that person in the moment when they are wanting to overeat? And answers with, “connection.” In this case, someone may be encouraged to reach out for support in those moments of intensity rather than trying to manage the cravings on their own.

It’s not that internal resources – like the capacity to feel the impulse to binge without acting on it – are wrong. But our overfocus on them is based upon a misunderstanding of how they are developed. They are grown from the inside out. And it is through relationship – through connection – that these internal resources are built. That’s why relationship and connection are so important. They are the foundation for growth and healing.

Seeing the order in eating disorders

I feel passionate about sharing this new way of seeing, for I’ve witnessed how it fosters clarity, relief, understanding, and ease. This perspective removes the burden and shame of eating disorders and sees their order, not their disorder.

It places them in a positive, life affirming, love affirming, humanity affirming position – versus a negative position, something dangerous or scary to cut out and control.

As my friend Isabelle Tierney puts it, food compulsions and eating disorders are “an attempt to feel good.” They are a cry and a thirst for love, and are rooted in a longing for goodness, connection and wholeness.

Since I’ve announced the retirement of these courses, I’ve received kind notes from folks who wrote to share how these courses had positively impacted them, and their sadness in seeing them go away. I feel touched by your notes, and I understand the sadness.

While these particular courses are going away, the essence of my teaching – that food compulsions arise out of disconnection, and that relationship (reconnection) is the answer – is not. I’m simply streamlining these courses into one path where in fact this essence can take root, and deepen.

So coupled with the sadness of change, my heart is overflowing with grief-love, and with celebration: I feel deep gratitude for these courses, for you and all who’ve walked their journey, for your courage and healing, for the teachers who seeded and inspired them, and for the Love that holds it all.

So while I feel grief, and gratitude, and wonderment, I also feel excited about what’s arising, the path I’ll be sharing with you this year. Like anyone who grows or tends anything, I’m approaching this new life with awe and humility, yearning to care for it well.

Eating disorders are typically seen as a problem of one person. So the focus is on fixing or healing the person with the problem with therapy, counseling, and more.

But I think eating disorders are primarily a relational and cultural issue. They serve as a mirror, revealing an emotion phobic, emotion shaming, human shaming culture that fears, subverts, stunts, and aborts the natural grieving process in the face of pain and loss.

Sadly, this is true not only in our general culture, but also in much of the spiritual and self help culture, in our popular myths and stories about identity, wellness, health, psychology, and self improvement.

It is seen in the Western pursuit of happiness, success, personal achievement and abundance and our fear and avoidance of sadness, pain, grief, and loss: our search for perpetual summer, and our eradication of winter, and fall.

We are so afraid to descend, to touch the soil of our sadness. We are afraid of our pain, our cravings, longings, neediness, compulsions, and obsessions. We are so afraid of what they say about us. We are so afraid of what others think of us because of what we feel and experience.

And so we go to war.

We hide, and we cover over, and we pursue good feelings, good experiences, good thoughts. There is no acceptance of “the other,” these holes, our grief, in either ourselves or in others.

We separate life into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” and work to eradicate that which we do not want. That which we can not accept, or invite, or love. This includes things like sugar addiction, and more poignantly, the pain that feeds them.

There is no room for this pain to exist. There is only separation.

The battle ground – and the casualty – of this war is our own hearts, our own soul.

Spiritual separation may be the most excruciating separation of all, because it feeds soul shame: a feeling that who we are – with our human vulnerability and pain and loss and confusion – can not and should not exist. That this earthy ground can not hold our clay feet and hands.

Sugar addiction, binge eating, and body obsession are an expression of our grief and pain, and ultimately of our human vulnerability: of those places where we experienced separation, where we lost pieces of ourself, of our souls. And as such, because they point to and are windows to our tender vulnerability, they have their own beauty, their own mystery and, yes, their own wisdom.

Because of this, they need and ask for our respect, for our deep listening. They demand it with their escalation, with their continued pursuit.

They are not to be pitied, and neither are the people who have them, for they are fierce and noble teachers and have their place in the cosmos, too.

Rather than cutting out the voice of the eating disorder, shaming it, or calling it “not me,” rather than demanding that those who suffer fight against this piece of themselves, the eating disorder longs to be enveloped, invited and integrated. To not be cast out as, “Other.”

It yearns for strength: for a circle of companions to bear witness to its story and to its grief.

It needs to be attended to, born witness to, to be held in love, and to be heard. Its pain needs to be poured out, so it no longer pours out into bingeing, purging, control, fasting, sugar bingeing, starving, and body hatred, but is reborn into beauty, healing, compassion, and a deeper, wider, greater wholeness: a wholeness that includes our pain and our humanity rather than excludes it.

The path to healing – what unwinds the food trance, what heals the compulsion to binge, to control your body, weight or diet, to obsess after sugar, or to compulsively pursue a perfect body – is not to know better or do better or to think better; to be more evolved or more spiritual or more transcendant, but to be – to become, to become fully human, to feel: to face the original loss, to feel the holes, to feel the original pain, and grieve.

In this grief, in our descent, we rise. For in the grieving process there is often a reorganization of our sense of self, a shift in the beliefs that we hold about ourselves, and the emergence of a vaster perspective that brings relief and healing to the soul. We reclaim what was lost, we rediscover our lost souls, and the food compulsion is reborn.

No longer separate, and no longer a cause for separation, it is held and healed in relationship, in love.

If you’ve gotten stuck in eating disorders, a food compulsion, or a sugar addiction, and you’ve been working really hard, trying to fix yourself, I invite you to lay that burden down. You do not need to fix yourself to heal, grow or change.

Believing that we need to fix ourselves – we being our personality, our human self – reflects a misunderstanding of what creates healing, growth and transformation.

Everything in us longs to heal and grow. It is what makes Life, life. Just as an acorn longs to be the fullest expression of what it is – to become an oak tree – there is something in the human being, in the human heart and soul and psyche, that longs to be all that we are. This longing is intrinsic in you, and is your ally in the growth process.

The good news about growth and development is that it isn’t something that you have to force or “do.” In fact, you can’t force it! As my mentor in developmental science, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, teaches, growth unfolds organically and spontaneously when there’s a container of safety, of loving relationship, and when the impediments to growth – too much alarm or separation – are removed.

What a relief: you don’t have to twist yourself into knots, exhausting yourself, working really, really hard on yourself to heal.

And what mercy: if you’ve gotten stuck – like struggling with a food compulsion like overeating or binge eating – this is not proof of a character flaw, a lack of will power, or even a lack of desire to heal. It simply means that you didn’t have what you need – that there was too much separation, too much alarm, and too little safety, rest, or room to grow.

As an adult, you can support your growth and development, what enables you to outgrow things like overeating, binge eating and sugar obsession. You can prime it. But in this role, you are the midwife, not the giver of life. The growth itself – how and when it unfolds – is in the hands of Life itself. It’s something that unfolds through you.

When you cede the responsibility for this growth to Life – and to the much wiser and deeper part of you – you remove the huge burden of fixing yourself that you’ve carried. The paradox is that by removing this burden of responsibility you find the rest and room to grow.

a willingness to receive love, care and support (simple to write, but frankly, one of the most vulnerable and therefore difficult tasks)

your intentions (your yearnings and heart felt desires)

and practices – this can include spiritual practices like prayer, contemplation, meditation, mindfulness, and yoga that support this transformation.

But supporting growth with tender hands is a very different animal than beating it with a stick, demanding its arrival.

Wayne Muller describes it poignantly here: “If we are quiet and listen and feel how things move, perhaps we will be wise enough to put our hands on what waits to be born, and bless it with kindness and care.”

The reward, above and beyond the growth itself, is how bearing witness to your growth grounds you into the web of life. It is a blessing of interconnectedness. Beholding the process of growth, the process of becoming, is like watching a child grow, a flower bloom, a tree give fruit. There is a rightness and beauty that brings a tear to the eye, an exhale to the heart, and a gasp of breath. It is wonderment, and a feeling of deep connection: you belong, too.

What relief to give up the reins, this belief that you have to be the maker and shaper of your growth process. Instead, try opening to the growth that is moving through you.

The beliefs and perceptions that we adopt as children – how we view others, ourselves, and our world – commonly shape our life experience, even into adulthood. These ingrained belief systems can be a contributing factor to addiction, eating disorders, and food compulsions like overeating or sugar bingeing. To find freedom from these painful coping strategies, it helps to investigate the underlying beliefs we carry.

If you identify with sentiments such as: “I’m too much, I’m not enough, I can’t trust myself, There’s something wrong with me,” then I invite you to this excerpt from When Food is Your Mother.

In this audio you’ll learn:

About some of the most common beliefs established in childhood

Why the pain of these beliefs often fuels you to overeat

And how you can let them go through the adaptive grieving process

Read a transcript

Where I see some of the deepest suffering of people who struggle with sugar addiction I see that they tend to carry a lot of beliefs forward into their lives as adults. Beliefs that as a child they used to make sense of their world. I am going to list some of the most common that I hear.
Then I will talk a little bit about how we let them go through this adaptive grieving process and how we can be free of the feelings that arise.

So here are some of the most common beliefs that I have seen. It’s all my fault, this has to do with the feelings of over-responsibility. I should be in control. I shouldn’t need. If I were perfect, I wouldn’t get hurt. A cousin of that is, If I were perfect, people would love me. I need to be more together. If I were more together I would always make the right decisions and I wouldn’t hurt. I’m too much. I’m too sensitive. There is something wrong with me. I should be more blank or the converse of that is, I should be less. I can’t be angry. I can’t be sad. I can’t be lonely. I can’t be needy.

Whatever it was that you didn’t feel like you could be as a child – “I’m not enough. I can’t trust myself” – this is what we seek outside ourselves for an answer: “There is a perfect solution out there somewhere and if I only study hard enough and search hard enough I will find it.” Trying to do things perfectly or idealism. A belief that no one is there. A belief that I can’t trust anyone to be there for me. A belief that I am unlovable.

So these are beliefs that many of us might be feeling about ourselves as adults and they impact our relationships around us. They impact our relationship with ourselves. They impact our relationships with others. These beliefs come out in our relationships with food.

The pain of these beliefs often fuels overeating. We often overeat or seek something to soften the pain of these. These beliefs can arise for any child, when it is confronted with pain that feels outside of their control. Because they are children and they are not in control, because they are dependent on the adults and their care, they will try to make sense of their world. These beliefs are the beliefs of a child and are at their root, they are immature. It is not a child’s fault, certainly, that the child may carry these beliefs. As adults what we tend to do is just carry these beliefs forward.

One way of healing these beliefs is recognizing. These beliefs can be a way to avoid adaption and to afford the process. As long as we are believing a belief of, I should be in control or I should in need or I can’t trust anyone to be there for me or I’m too much and too sensitive and we can get caught in trying to effect change around that. So we try to be more in control. We try to need less or we try to be less sensitive. Are all those things that we think are too much about us, we try to make them less much. Try to be less intense or less emotional or less sensitive. And we think that if I just change, I just affect change, I can make it work.

So we are trying to make it work. What we need to do instead, our tasks as adults is to let go off childish things and I say that with so much compassion. It’s to release these childish beliefs. These beliefs arose as a source of protection. They are how we protected ourselves from things at the time that felt too much to bear. As adults, we need to grieve these beliefs and let them go. In my experience it’s often easier to remain bound to these beliefs, to keep trying to make them work, to keep believing that they are true rather than letting them go. Because what are these beliefs protecting us from?

They are protecting us from feelings of loss. If we are blaming ourselves, all these are forms of self blame. Something didn’t work for you as a child. Maybe you didn’t feel seen by the ones that you loved. Maybe whenever something went wrong in your home, you took that pain on yourself and you said, ‘oh, its all my fault.’ Maybe you didn’t feel like you could have all your emotions and people could still love you. Maybe you felt like that there was some chaos in your early life and you have felt like you should have been the one controlling them. Maybe you felt like you had to be perfect to be loved.

As long as you are believing these things and taking on the self blame, what you are not feeling, is the root loss. You are not feeling the root loss of, I didn’t felt seen, I didn’t feel like I could have all emotions and still be loved, I didn’t feel like I could be imperfect and be lovable, I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t feel secure, I felt like I had to be in-charge, I felt like if things were going haywire I needed to fix it or simply the chaos was painful for me as a child.

Those things that felt out of control, they hurt. I hope this makes sense. These beliefs that we carried as young children and that many of us carried forward today, they are pointing to our need to feel the loss and the sorrow that is underneath them. So that we can let them go.